New York Times
By Ian Urbina
May 24, 2014
HOUSTON
— The kitchen of the detention center here was bustling as a dozen
immigrants boiled beans and grilled hot dogs, preparing lunch for about
900 other detainees.
Elsewhere, guards stood sentry and managers took head counts, but the
detainees were doing most of the work — mopping bathroom stalls, folding
linens, stocking commissary shelves.
As
the federal government cracks down on immigrants in the country
illegally and forbids businesses to hire them, it is relying on tens of
thousands of those immigrants
each year to provide essential labor — usually for $1 a day or less —
at the detention centers where they are held when caught by the
authorities.
This
work program is facing increasing resistance from detainees and
criticism from immigrant advocates. In April, a lawsuit accused
immigration authorities in Tacoma,
Wash., of putting detainees in solitary confinement after they staged a
work stoppage and hunger strike. In Houston, guards pressed other
immigrants to cover shifts left vacant by detainees who refused to work
in the kitchen, according to immigrants interviewed
here.
The
federal authorities say the program is voluntary, legal and a
cost-saver for taxpayers. But immigrant advocates question whether it is
truly voluntary or lawful, and
argue that the government and the private prison companies that run
many of the detention centers are bending the rules to convert a captive
population into a self-contained labor force.
Last
year, at least 60,000 immigrants worked in the federal government’s
nationwide patchwork of detention centers — more than worked for any
other single employer in
the country, according to data from United States Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. The cheap labor, 13 cents an hour,
saves the government and the private companies $40 million or more a
year by allowing them to avoid paying outside contractors
the $7.25 federal minimum wage. Some immigrants held at county jails
work for free, or are paid with sodas or candy bars, while also
providing services like meal preparation for other government
institutions.
Unlike
inmates convicted of crimes, who often participate in prison work
programs and forfeit their rights to many wage protections, these
immigrants are civil detainees
placed in holding centers, most of them awaiting hearings to determine
their legal status. Roughly half of the people who appear before
immigration courts are ultimately permitted to stay in the United States
— often because they were here legally, because
they made a compelling humanitarian argument to a judge or because
federal authorities decided not to pursue the case.
“I
went from making $15 an hour as a chef to $1 a day in the kitchen in
lockup,” said Pedro Guzmán, 34, who had worked for restaurants in
California, Minnesota and North
Carolina before he was picked up and held for about 19 months, mostly
at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. “And I was in the country
legally.”
Mr.
Guzmán said that he had been required to work even when he was running a
fever, that guards had threatened him with solitary confinement if he
was late for his 2 a.m.
shift, and that his family had incurred more than $75,000 in debt from
legal fees and lost income during his detention. A Guatemalan native, he
was released in 2011 after the courts renewed his visa, which had
mistakenly been revoked, in part because of a
clerical error. He has since been granted permanent residency.
Claims of Exploitation
Officials
at private prison companies declined to speak about their use of
immigrant detainees, except to say that it was legal. Federal officials
said the work helped
with morale and discipline and cut expenses in a detention system that
costs more than $2 billion a year.
“The
program allows detainees to feel productive and contribute to the
orderly operation of detention facilities,” said Gillian M. Christensen,
a spokeswoman for the immigration
agency. Detainees in the program are not officially employees, she
said, and their payments are stipends, not wages. No one is forced to
participate, she added, and there are usually more volunteers than jobs.
Marian
Martins, 49, who was picked up by ICE officers in 2009 for overstaying
her visa and sent to Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Ala.,
said work had been
her only ticket out of lockdown, where she was placed when she arrived
without ever being told why.
Ms.
Martins said she had worked most days cooking meals, scrubbing showers
and buffing hallways. Her only compensation was extra free time outside
or in a recreational
room, where she could mingle with other detainees, watch television or
read, she said.
“People
fight for that work,” said Ms. Martins, who has no criminal history. “I
was always nervous about being fired, because I needed the free time.”
Ms.
Martins fled Liberia during the civil war there and entered the United
States on a visitor visa in 1990. She stayed and raised three children,
all of whom are American
citizens, including two sons in the Air Force. Because of her
deteriorating health, she was released from detention in August 2010
with an electronic ankle bracelet while awaiting a final determination
of her legal status.
Natalie
Barton, a spokeswoman for the Etowah detention center, declined to
comment on Ms. Martins’s claims but said that all work done on site by
detained immigrants was
unpaid, and that the center complied with all local and federal rules.
The
compensation rules at detention facilities are remnants of a bygone
era. A 1950 law created the federal Voluntary Work Program and set the
pay rate at a time when
$1 went much further. (The equivalent would be about $9.80 today.)
Congress last reviewed the rate in 1979 and opted not to raise it. It
was later challenged in a lawsuit under the Fair Labor Standards Act,
which sets workplace rules, but in 1990 an appellate
court upheld the rate, saying that “alien detainees are not government
‘employees.’ ”
Immigrants
in holding centers may be in the country illegally, but they may also
be asylum seekers, permanent residents or American citizens whose
documentation is questioned
by the authorities. On any given day, about 5,500 detainees out of the
30,000-plus average daily population work for $1, in 55 of the roughly
250 detention facilities used by ICE. Local governments operate 21 of
the programs, and private companies run the
rest, agency officials said.
These
detainees are typically compensated with credits toward food,
toiletries and phone calls that they say are sold at inflated prices.
(They can collect cash when they
leave if they have not used all their credits.) “They’re making money
on us while we work for them,” said Jose Moreno Olmedo, 25, a Mexican
immigrant who participated in the hunger strike at the Tacoma holding
center and was released on bond from the center
in March. “Then they’re making even more money on us when we buy from
them at the commissary.”
A Legal Gray Area
Some
advocates for immigrants express doubts about the legality of the work
program, saying the government and contractors are exploiting a legal
gray area.
“This
in essence makes the government, which forbids everyone else from
hiring people without documents, the single largest employer of
undocumented immigrants in the
country,” said Carl Takei, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties
Union’s National Prison Project.
Jacqueline
Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University,
said she believed the program violated the 13th Amendment, which
abolished slavery and
involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime. “By law, firms
contracting with the federal government are supposed to match or
increase local wages, not commit wage theft,” she said.
Immigration
officials underestimate the number of immigrants involved and the hours
they work, Professor Stevens added. Based on extrapolations from ICE
contracts she
has reviewed, she said, more than 135,000 immigrants a year may be
involved, and private prison companies and the government may be
avoiding paying more than $200 million in wages that outside employers
would collect.
A
2012 report by the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Georgia described immigrants’
being threatened with solitary confinement if they refused certain
work. Also, detainees said
instructions about the program’s voluntary nature were sometimes given
in English even though most of the immigrants do not speak the language.
Eduardo
Zuñiga, 36, spent about six months in 2011 at the Stewart Detention
Center in Georgia, awaiting deportation to Mexico. He had been detained
after being stopped
at a roadblock in the Atlanta area because he did not have a driver’s
license and because his record showed a decade-old drug conviction for
which he had received probation.
At
Stewart, Mr. Zuñiga worked in the kitchen and tore ligaments in one of
his knees after slipping on a newly mopped floor, leaving him unable to
walk without crutches.
Despite doctors’ orders to stay off the leg, Mr. Zuñiga said, the
guards threatened him with solitary confinement if he did not cover his
shifts. Now back in Mexico, he said in a phone interview that he must
walk with a leg brace.
Gary
Mead, who was a top ICE administrator until last year, said the agency
scrutinized contract bids from private companies to ensure that they did
not overestimate how
much they could depend on detainees to run the centers.
Detainees
cannot work more than 40 hours a week or eight hours a day, according
to the agency. They are limited to work that directly contributes to the
operation of their
detention facility, said Ms. Christensen, the agency spokeswoman, and
are not supposed to provide services or make goods for the outside
market.
But that rule does not appear to be strictly enforced.
At
the Joe Corley Detention Facility north of Houston, about 140 immigrant
detainees prepare about 7,000 meals a day, half of which are shipped to
the nearby Montgomery
County jail. Pablo E. Paez, a spokesman for the GEO Group, which runs
the center, said his company had taken it over from the county in 2013
and was working to end the outside meal program.
Near
San Francisco, at the Contra Costa West County Detention Facility,
immigrants work alongside criminal inmates to cook about 900 meals a day
that are packaged and
trucked to a county homeless shelter and nearby jails.
A Booming Business
While
President Obama has called for an overhaul of immigration law, his
administration has deported people — roughly two million in the last
five years — at a faster
pace than any of his predecessors. The administration says the sharp
rise in the number of detainees has been partly driven by a requirement
from Congress that ICE fill a daily quota of more than 30,000 beds in
detention facilities. The typical stay is about
a month, though some detainees are held much longer, sometimes for
years.
Detention
centers are low-margin businesses, where every cent counts, said
Clayton J. Mosher, a professor of sociology at Washington State
University, Vancouver, who specializes
in the economics of prisons. Two private prison companies, the
Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, control most of
the immigrant detention market. Many such companies struggled in the
late 1990s amid a glut of private prison construction,
with more facilities built than could be filled, but a spike in
immigrant detention after Sept. 11 helped revitalize the industry.
The
Corrections Corporation of America’s revenue, for example, rose more
than 60 percent over the last decade, and its stock price climbed to
more than $30 from less than
$3. Last year, the company made $301 million in net income and the GEO
Group made $115 million, according to earnings reports.
Prison
companies are not the only beneficiaries of immigrant labor. About 5
percent of immigrants who work are unpaid, ICE data show. Sheriff
Richard K. Jones of Butler
County, Ohio, said his county saved at least $200,000 to $300,000 a
year by relying on about 40 detainees each month for janitorial work.
“All I know is it’s a lot of money saved,” he said.
Mark
Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an
advocacy group that promotes greater controls on immigration, said that
with proper monitoring,
the program had its advantages, and that the criticisms of it were part
of a larger effort to delegitimize immigration detention.
Some
immigrants said they appreciated the chance to work. Minsu Jeon, 23, a
South Korean native who was freed in January after a monthlong stay at
an immigration detention
center in Ocilla, Ga., said that while he thought the pay was unfair,
working as a cook helped pass the time.
“They don’t feed you that much,” he added, “but you could eat food if you worked in the kitchen.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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